Ravinia 2023 Issue 3

MARA ARTEAGA (ORTIZ); SHELLEY MOSMAN (MONTERO) I ; GABRIELA ORTIZ (b.1964) Antrópolis Scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, two tenor trombones and bass trombones, tuba, timpani, five percussions playing snare drum, glockenspiel, two bongos, xylophone, vibraslap, claves, large suspended cymbals, whip, marimba, drum set, metal guiro, maracas, guiro, vibraphone, bass drum, small maracas, almglocken, three tin cans, cymbals, cowbell, and strings Childhood for Gabriela Ortiz was awash in Mexican popular music, often courtesy of her parents, an architect father and psychoana- lyst mother, who also were founding mem- bers of the folk music ensemble Los Folklor- istas. Her hometown of Mexico City also offered classical music training and wide ac- cess to global artists. Ortiz studied composi- tion at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música with Mario Lavista and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with Federico Ibarra before traveling to England on a Brit- ish Council Fellowship for advanced compo- sition studies with Robert Saxton at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Sub- sequently, Ortiz completed a doctorate in electroacoustic music composition at The City University of London. Ortiz’s wide-ranging compositions for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orches- tra, electroacoustic groupings, opera, dance, theater, and film have been performed wide- ly and commissioned by artists such as the Kronos Quartet, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, Royal Liverpool Philhar- monic, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, and soprano Dawn Upshaw, among many others. She has received numerous awards, includ- ing Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, first prize hon- ors in the Silvestre Revueltas National Cham- ber Music Competition and Alicia Urreta Composition Competition, induction into Mexico’s Academia de Artes, and the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, awarded by the Mexican government. Gabriela Ortiz Carlos Miguel Prieto, music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic, commissioned Ortiz’s Antrópolis for an 80th birthday cele- bration of Philip Glass at Carnegie Hall on February 27, 2018. As subject matter, Ortiz resurrected an idea she had developed years before: “The word ‘antro’ has its origin in the Latin ‘antrum,’ meaning ‘grotto’ or ‘cavern. In Mexico, until the ’90s, the term referred to bars or entertainment places of dubious rep- utation. But nowadays, and especially among younger people, this word refers to any bar or nightclub. One time, while talking with flutist Alejandro Escuer, we imagined the title of a future work, one that would synthesize the music of Mexico’s legendary dance halls and bars: Antrópolis , a neologism, a precise invented name for a piece that narrates the sound of the city through its dance halls and nightclubs. “Given the parameters of the commission, I retrieved the title we had imagined, and thus Antrópolis came to life. It is a piece in which I wanted to pay a very personal tribute to some of those antros or emblematic dance halls of Mexico City that left a special imprint on my memory and represent the nostalgia for rumberas and live dance orchestras, such as El Bombay, where it is said that Che Gue- vara would twirl; or the Salón Colonia, which seems to have come out of dreams taken from a film of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Who doesn’t remember the fun ballroom Los Infiernos, a perfect place for those who after a long day at work would leave their cubicles to go dancing, drink, and listen to music. Final- ly, the memory of the bar Tutti Frutti, where I first met the punk couple who own the antro, and where you could listen to experimental music from the 1980s. “ Antrópolis is the sonorous reflection of a city through its antros, including the accumula- tion of experiences that we bring, and that form an essential part of our history in this very complex but fascinating Mexico City.” GABRIELA MONTERO (b.1970) Piano Concerto No. 1 (“Latin”) Scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, cowbells (small, medium, deep, and very thin), brake drum, medium hi-hat, large clave, guiro, medium pedal bass tom, bongos, wood blocks (piccolo, medium, low), tom-toms (small, medium, large), tam- tam, piccolo claves, piccolo triangle, low-A rototom, assorted sticks (drum, cowbell, metal, etc.), pads to muffle tom-toms, maracas (small plastic, egg-shake or small gourd, Venezuelan style), crash cymbals, tambourine or similar metallic shaker, large marimba, high-pitched congas, harp, strings, and solo piano “Composing to me—creating, improvising, whatever you call it—is at the core of what matters to me,” Gabriela Montero revealed in an interview for the Bournemouth Sym- phony Orchestra. “Being alive equals being creative. Having a message is vital to me.” This lifelong imaginative, expressive impulse has rewarded Montero with a multifaceted career as a piano soloist, musical creator, and human rights activist. The child of an American mother and Vene- zuelan father, Gabriela Montero was born in Caracas and spent her first eight years living in her father’s homeland. As a 7-month-old, Gabriela received her first musical instru- ment: a two-octave toy piano that her grand- mother placed in the crib. By the age of 17 or 18 months, Gabriela could pick out melodies, such as lullabies and “Happy Birthday,” on the little keyboard. When her grandmother pre- sented a full-size piano as a gift on her third birthday, Gabriela ran through her extensive repertoire of tunes and started to improvise. Formal piano lessons with Lyl Tiempo—the mother of pianists Karin Lechner and Sergio Tiempo and grandmother of pianist Natasha Binder—began the following year. Gabriela gave her first concerto performance at age 8. The Monteros moved their 11-year-old prod- igy to Miami for private piano lessons sup- ported by a scholarship from the Venezuelan government. Gabriela resided in the United States for 10 years before entering the Roy- al Academy of Music in London, where she graduated and, in 2007, was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. A whirlwind career quickly followed with concerto ap- pearances, solo and chamber music recitals, and a string of honors for her musical accom- plishments and activism. Montero performed at Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration during the Swearing In Ceremony at the US Capitol on January 20, 2009. She has received the Rockefeller Award (2012) for her contri- butions to the arts and the Fourth Interna- tional Beethoven Award (2018) for her “advo- cacy and dedication to human rights, peace, freedom, inclusion, and the war on poverty.” Montero received the 2015 Latin Grammy for Best Classical Album for her first composi- tion Ex Patria , op. 1 ( In memoriam )—“a tone Gabriela Montero poem designed to illustrate and protest Ven- ezuela’s descent into lawlessness, corruption, and violence”—recorded by The Orchestra of the Americas and conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. That same year, Amnesty Interna- tional named Montero one of its first three Honorary Consuls, “chosen because of their ability to inspire others through their art and personal passion, as well as their individual commitment to human rights.” NPR’s Perfor- mance Today recently named Gabriela Mon- tero its 2023 Classical Woman of the Year. Montero was the soloist in the world pre- miere of her Piano Concerto No. 1, given at the Leipzig Gewandhaus by the MDR Sinfo- nieorchester under Kristjan Järvi on March 20, 2016. She provided the following notes for her 2019 recording with The Orchestra of the Americas under Prieto for Orchid Classics: “I am a globalized, Latin American woman raised on a diet of European classical music with multiple, circumstantial side-dishes of Pan-American folklore. I also consider myself to be a musician whose primary role is to tell stories that reflect the wide gamut of human experience across both time and geography. Every era and continent has its story to tell, however joyful or troubling, from Renais- sance Europe to the contemporary Americas, and composers are well positioned not only to tell it, but to provide a unique form of so- cial commentary. “In a process of musical osmosis—a natural consequence of the interconnected world in which we now live—my Piano Concerto No. 1, the ‘Latin’ Concerto, honors the mu- sical traditions that have shaped me, while inviting the cultural idioms of my native con- tinent to the concert halls of Europe and the wider world. European formalism and the in- formality of Latin-America’s rich, rhythmical identity merge in a complementary dance of both the joyful and macabre. “Writing my concerto, I set out to describe the complex and often contradictory char- acter of Latin America, from the rhythmi- cally exuberant to the forebodingly demon- ic. Unlike my previous work for piano and orchestra—the specifically Venezuelan po- lemic Ex Patria (2011), a musical portrait of a country in collapse—the ‘Latin’ Concerto draws upon the spirit of the broader South American continent. For every suggestion of surface celebration in the first-movement Mambo , for instance, there are undercur- rents of disruption. The third-movement Allegro venezolano , which cites the well- known Venezuelan pajarillo , is interrupted at times by the dark arts of black magic, a symbolic reminder of the malevolent forces that, too often, hold our continent hostage to tyranny in its multiple guises.” RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 31